I haven't re-read these in years. I think I was about 11 when I first tried to read Lord of the Rings, but I didn't have the attention span to get very far. At some point, I read The Hobbit and I think I was about 16 when I actually read LOTR for real. I remember feeling absolutely betrayed when I got to the end of the first book and it was a cliffhanger. Up until that, my experience was with series where you just had recurring characters in otherwise stand-alone stories. I didn't grasp ahead of time that the trilogy was one single story that was broken into parts mainly because you couldn't lift the thing if it was all one volume.
The odd thing is that at the time I didn't even notice the lack of female characters. (It wasn't until the films came along that it struck me.) It goes a long way in demonstrating how even female readers are accustomed to normalizing male as the default. I love that it prompted you to create your own characters. And if any universe could get away with stunningly beautiful elf maidens with color-changing eyes, Middle Earth would be it. :-)
(I used to draw alien women--sometimes blue, sometimes with cat ears--and my classic Mary Sue was a space smuggler who dressed in a Han Solo vest, but had long dark braids like Princess Leia.)
The thing is... we've all been sort of trained to look back at our "terrible Mary Sue stories" as bad when there are so many less-probably male characters out there. And usually, the main thing that was bad about them was just that we were young and inexperienced and if we wrote them now they'd be lovely. But as we mature as writers, we make a conscious effort to avoid anything that might be seen as "just a Mary Sue" story, which means fewer kick-ass original female characters in those male-centric universes that could really use a few more female characters. (When I look at my own fanfic, it's embarrassing how few have any significant female characters at all.)
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The odd thing is that at the time I didn't even notice the lack of female characters. (It wasn't until the films came along that it struck me.) It goes a long way in demonstrating how even female readers are accustomed to normalizing male as the default. I love that it prompted you to create your own characters. And if any universe could get away with stunningly beautiful elf maidens with color-changing eyes, Middle Earth would be it. :-)
(I used to draw alien women--sometimes blue, sometimes with cat ears--and my classic Mary Sue was a space smuggler who dressed in a Han Solo vest, but had long dark braids like Princess Leia.)
The thing is... we've all been sort of trained to look back at our "terrible Mary Sue stories" as bad when there are so many less-probably male characters out there. And usually, the main thing that was bad about them was just that we were young and inexperienced and if we wrote them now they'd be lovely. But as we mature as writers, we make a conscious effort to avoid anything that might be seen as "just a Mary Sue" story, which means fewer kick-ass original female characters in those male-centric universes that could really use a few more female characters. (When I look at my own fanfic, it's embarrassing how few have any significant female characters at all.)